As Mr. Leventhal was quick to remind him, he actually is an Army veteran, with a memorable stint in the Signal Corps in India in World War II. But if anyone in American music qualifies as a veteran promoter, it is Harold Leventhal, who began as a song plugger for Irving Berlin, survived the blacklist with the folk singing Weavers, put on Bob Dylan's first concert hall date, and has been bringing artists to places like Carnegie Hall for nearly half a century.

He is pretty much down to one event a year, two Thanksgiving weekend concerts that began with the Weavers around 1960, then featured Pete Seeger and for years now have featured Arlo Guthrie, with Mr. Seeger as a guest this year at Carnegie. The concerts on the Friday and Saturday after Thanksgiving keep adding new generations. This year they include Mr. Seeger's grandson, Tao Rodriguez, and Mr. Guthrie's children, Abe and Sarah.

But pushing 80, Mr. Leventhal remains a living history of 20th-century music from the big-band era through the folk revival, when he managed or promoted concerts for such artists as the Weavers, Mr. Seeger, Theodore Bikel, Judy Collins and Joan Baez and handled the business affairs of Woody Guthrie as he began to show the effects of Huntington's disease, the degenerative illness that killed him in 1967. He now spends much of his time managing the Woody Guthrie archives with Mr. Guthrie's daughter, Nora.

''Harold's a remarkable person, totally honest with a great sense of humor,'' said Mr. Seeger, who pays tribute to Mr. Leventhal in the program notes for the Thanksgiving concert. ''He did something extraordinary for the Weavers. He stuck his neck out and had faith in us when others wouldn't. You might say he had faith in America, too.''

Mr. Leventhal never much went beyond the artists and ethos of the folk era, but he doesn't feel he missed much either. ''I got some calls from rock groups,'' he said without much interest. Prodded for examples he cites, ''A trio. I can't recall the name. Stills was one of them.'' It was Crosby, Stills and Nash.

''But I wanted to stay where I was comfortable and stay with people I thought were making a good contribution. I never felt comfortable in the rock world. The behavior. The whole scene. It wasn't my style.''

Mr. Leventhal's style mixes liberal politics, the Bronx of the Depression years and the laid-back sensibilities of the folk era. Wearing a gray sweater vest and sky blue turtleneck over his Santa Claus physique, he has the look of a frizzy Jewish Buddha and he can drop remarkable names as casually as Mel Brooks's 2,000-Year-Old Man.

Mr. Leventhal was born in Ellenville, N.Y., in 1919, the youngest of five children of immigrant parents, his mother from the Ukraine, his father from Lithuania. His father died of the flu eight weeks after Mr. Leventhal was born. The next year the family moved to the Lower East Side, his mother working as a janitor in the building where they lived, and then to the Bronx in 1933.

Without a record player in the house, music was not a big part of his youth, except for an occasional trip to the Yiddish theaters on Second Avenue. But his older brother, Herbert, got a job with Irving Berlin, and Mr. Leventhal followed him there, soon working as a song plugger, taking Berlin's songs to big bands like Harry James's or singers like Dinah Shore, then staying out schmoozing until 2 in the morning at Lindy's and other nightspots. A favorite memory is pairing Frank Sinatra with Benny Goodman as a one-night fill in.

Somehow he found a way to transplant those skills to India when he served there as a corporal in the Signal Corps.

''The most charismatic man I ever met was Nehru,'' he allowed in talking about World War II. A photo of the two hangs in his office. ''Handsome. Debonair. Gracious in his manner. A very impressive man.''

It turns out India's first Prime Minister also gave him a letter of introduction to take to Gandhi.

''The first day I met him was a Thursday; he doesn't talk on Thursday,'' Mr. Leventhal recalled. ''I wrote him a note, and he wrote on it I should come back the next day, which I did. The first thing he wanted to know was how Paul Robeson was. I didn't know much except to say that as far as I knew he was O.K. We had several talks. He wanted to know about Truman, who had just become President. He was very inquisitive about that. It was all a unique experience for an Army corporal.''

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After the war he gravitated back to the music business and one night in 1949 found himself in Greenwich Village listening to the Weavers, who were unknown at the time. Folk music was the most distant commercial backwater, but he liked the members, their politics and their music and soon became their manager.

It was the most important liaison of his career.

The Weavers -- Pete Seeger, Fred Hellerman, Lee Hays and Ronnie Gilbert -- were the first commercial success of the folk revival of the 1950's and 60's. And their members, particularly Mr. Seeger, were some of the most prominent targets of Senator Joseph R. McCarthy's investigations and the blacklists that followed. The Weavers were dropped by their label and went from million-selling artists to commercial pariahs. But they stayed together, outlasted the McCarthy era and in the end prevailed.

Mr. Seeger recalls that Mr. Leventhal pushed them to do concert dates during their darkest days. He was turned down by Town Hall but managed to book them at Carnegie Hall and sold out in 1955 as the McCarthy era was at its peak, Mr. Seeger said.

Mr. Leventhal's laconic voice gets an uncharacteristic bite when he talks about those days.

''These were people to be admired, for their music and for facing up to the blacklist,'' Mr. Leventhal said. ''I'm proud to have been part of it and proud that we never succumbed to any of the pressure.''

As folk music became more commercially successful, most of the artists made their way to his office. There, he has a poster with his trademark, ''Harold Leventhal Presents,'' at the top for Bob Dylan's first concert hall date, at Town Hall, April 12, 1963. Tickets were $2, $2.75 and $3.

''Of course, he came to New York looking for Woody Guthrie, and he had to come here to find Woody,'' he said. ''He was a nice fella, tried to imitate Woody in his speech and his dress. To tell you the truth, he just struck me as another singer coming on the scene. The Town Hall concert didn't sell out. I also had him in small halls in Westchester and Philadelphia. He never packed them either.''

A personal favorite was Phil Ochs, who became a mainstay of the folk and protest songs, then turned to drugs and drinking and committed suicide in 1976.

''He was obsessed with being bigger than Dylan and then with being a cross between Dylan and Elvis,'' he said. ''It was a shame. I admired him in the early days, and then it was as if everything got thrown off balance.''

A few recent copies of Rolling Stone are on a couch, but Mr. Leventhal's office has the feel of history more than commerce, with posters and programs from a half century of concerts, shows and movies he produced or co-produced. One wall has four signed pictures of him with Irving Berlin, Benny Goodman, Frank Sinatra and Peggy Lee.

Mr. Leventhal tends to dote on the favorites, Mr. Seeger, the first Weavers concert at Town Hall, Jacques Brel and the Weavers film for which he was a co-producer, ''Wasn't That a Time.''

''I think we played a very positive and meaningful role in the culture of the country,'' he said. ''You take Woody Guthrie. His music is more popular today than when he was living. So much of the music today is so self-centered. It's all about people's personal problems and almost none of it's about the problems of humanity.''

Not that everything was quite so memorable.

He peered over at the framed Playbill for the Joseph Heller play ''We Bombed in New Haven,'' for which he was a co-producer in 1968.

''Bombed in New York, too,'' he said.

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A version of this article appears in print on November 26, 1998, on Page E00001 of the National edition with the headline: He Caught Folk On the Rise And Held On. Order Reprints|Today's Paper|Subscribe